Web content management (WCM) systems are used to create, manage, and control collections of web-based material, e.g., Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents, PHP documents, images, and others. A WCM system generally facilitates document control, editing, timeline management, and publication of a website. For instance, a typical WCM system can provide one or more of the following features: automated templates, easily editable content, workflow management, document management, and content virtualization, among others. Using a WCM system provides developers with tools that allow for the creation of attractive and well-designed web pages and/or websites with uniform or related layouts.
Modern websites often use web content management (WCM) systems. WCM systems allow website administrators to control the content of their web pages, among other features. For instance, WCM systems allow users to add or edit information on a web page without requiring programming knowledge and to manage content workflows and user permissions.
With the growing complexity of website design, content management has evolved from merely managing the storage and access of document data on local computers to controlling increasingly complex data such as HTML codes, modules, permissions, and the linking of sub-pages and hosted images to a web site, with near real-time updates.
Many web content management (WCM) systems exist in the marketplace, such as Sitecore® (of Sitecore Corporation), Drupal™ (open source), Adobe CQ® (of Adobe Systems Incorporated), HP Autonomy TeamSite™ (of HP Autonomy), Oracle Fatwire (of Oracle Corporation), Microsoft SharePoint (of Microsoft Corporation), EPiServer® (of EPiServer Inc.), OpenText® web site management (of OpenText Corp.), Ektron® WCM (of Ektron, Inc.), among others. Each of the systems has unique features and functionalities. As general matter, each of these systems has an internal working environment that enables web administrators to control and manipulate website content prior to publishing the site on the web. Moreover, within its internal working environment, each WCM system has unique terminology and linking methodologies. This enables these systems to provide ease of use for within their respective environments, but make transportability of websites between systems problematic.
The state of the art in website design and WCM systems advances quickly. As such, site administrators periodically elect to move their websites to new WCM systems to keep pace with the rapidly increasing sophistication of web-based systems. In addition, as a company grows, its requirements for a WCM system change. With a small company, a basic WCM system might be satisfactory. However, as companies grow, they frequently have the need to use increasingly complex WCM systems. Thus, companies will find the need to migrate between WCM systems.
However, migration can be a difficult problem. Current approaches for migrating content can be labor-intensive and highly vulnerable to error. As a result, some companies are forced to write individualized code to automate part of the data migration process, but this is highly technical and time-consuming. As a result, most data migration projects either fail or go over budget.
Off-the-shelf systems for data migration exist and can be generally effective from transferring data files, however, shortfalls exist. For example, such systems typically migrate the published website files. As a result, the functionality that existed within the internal working environment of the first WCM system is lost, such as internal linking, templates, WCM-specific terminology, and other features, which the web administrator often must manually correct within the new WCM environment. Moreover, current approaches can be slow—it can take several days to transfer between WCM systems, resulting in times when the website is unavailable.
It should, therefore, be appreciated that there exists a need for a data migration system that rapidly transfers all the data needed.